


Exit From the Underworld

by pvwork



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Family Feels, Gen, Interviews
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-17
Updated: 2018-06-17
Packaged: 2019-05-24 17:11:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14958696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pvwork/pseuds/pvwork
Summary: “Matt Holt? A total genius,” Cadet Pidge Gunderson, communications track, said. “I never met him, but it’s totally impossible to forget his impact. He’s a tech wunderkind, and a great psychologist. What was he better versed in? The human psyche or the inner workings of a ship radio? Impossible to know. He was probably great at both!”





	Exit From the Underworld

Before any high flyer can journey into the Great Beyond, they have to go through the Galaxy Garrison first. And before I could get to the Garrison, I had to take my first trip in a helicopter.

This high off the ground everything looked like one giant red-brown blur. The campus rose from the desert like a mirage. Some parts of it were visible to the casual observer, but most of it was hidden from the harsh glare of the sun and prying eyes by virtue of having been built underground. What was visible was steel and smooth walls of gray, self-cleaning concrete sprawled across constantly shifting sands.

The Garrison had an official affiliations with the Global Space Exploration Association (GSEA) and an unofficial affiliation with the Air Force. The purpose of the Garrison was to train high caliber air and space crewmen. It had tracks for almost every imaginable technical position any sort of flying craft might require. Everyone, from engineers to communication officers, cargo and fighter pilots, all had to attend the Garrison to get licensed.

In 2155, the Garrison had around 10,000 attending cadets, 600 of whom were on track to graduate that year. The student to instructor ratio was 15:1 with additional assistance from junior instructors, paid positions for recent graduates who chose to remain at the Garrison to conduct research projects or assist in teaching courses.

The year before Inspiration took off, two junior instructors and one full time researcher were tapped for a mission on a far flung moon named Kerberos.

*

 

Sammuel Holt grew up in a family of musicians. His mother was a violin teacher and his father was a songwriter.

Growing up in St. Cloud, a city that had retained much of its twenty-first century charm, the youngest Holt grew into an inquisitive and sensitive child.

“He took 'sharing is caring' to heart,” Grace Holt, his mother, said. “Here was this cool rock he found, or a new song he’d written he’d like you to hear.”

A serendipitous trip to a local observatory would set Sammuel’s sights on a path deep into space. Sammuel taught himself how to code and edit photos so he could help transform the raw data that came from distance rovers into clearer, more vivid images to share with a tight online community. He even joined a society of amateur astronomers in high school called the “Copernicus Cooperative” who later changed their name to “Algoritmi Agglomeration”.

This passion would lead Sammuel through his first degree in astronomy into a doctorate in astrophysics which he began in 2129. Coincidentally, the observatory that he worked in was where he met a recruiter named Charles Almagest.

I reached out to Charles to talk about Sammuel and received a glowing character reference even though the two had stopped keeping in touch nearly eighteen years ago.

“Sam was brilliant. But that’s not what made him such a great man,” Charles wrote. “There was this enthusiasm he had for telling people about what he did. It made people excited about stuff they hadn’t even known about before meeting Sam. People _liked_ funding his research.”

Charles would eventually put Sammuel into contact with the Garrison, which was interested in Sammuel’s research. It was this research that brought him in contact with Kerberos.

The observatory had initially brought on Sammuel to help them process the information they were gathering from their telescopes and satellite dishes. Sammuel always had one eye turned towards the sky.

“He fell down the stairs and broke his arm,” Colleen Holt ne Johnson said. “That’s how I met him.”

I met with Colleen, a nurse, in the cafeteria of St. Cloud Hospital. She was a mild mannered woman with a twinkle in her eyes. She was also wearing the ugliest pair of scrubs I had ever seen. Two schools of fish swam across her torso, and a giant multi-colored blue whale rested its psychedelic head on her shoulder.

“Peds ward tonight,” Colleen explained to me when she caught me giving her scrubs a second glance.

“After he gets his arm set, and I’m helping him do his exit paperwork, he said, and I quote, ‘Do you want to go see a meteor shower with me? But not like a date’. I had these scrubs on with shooting stars all over, and he thought I might like to see real shooting stars. And the rest is history.”

Colleen and Sam had two children, Matthew and Katherine. They raised their family in a small house allotted to Sam by the Garrison. Colleen found work with the medical division. Matt was fifteen when he was accepted into the Garrison after passing his entrance exams.

“The mission kind of took everything from me, you know?” Colleen said. Her tone was light, but there were lines of grief around her eyes. “I moved home to be closer to my parents. Everything is so green here, and nothing like the desert.”

*

Matthew Holt was the oldest son. He had been on track to becoming a communications officer. When he wasn’t researching the tech to make better communication possible, he was researching methods to make communication more palatable to be people potentially traveling together on longer space voyages.

At the Garrison, Matt started an improv group in part, to better understand how people could interact in meaningful and cooperative ways, according to the group’s constitution.

“Matt Holt? A total genius,” Cadet Pidge Gunderson, communications track, said. “I never met him, but it’s totally impossible to forget his impact. He’s a tech wunderkind, and a great psychologist. What was he better versed in? The human psyche or the inner workings of a ship radio? Impossible to know. He was probably great at both!”

Matt was obviously well regarded among his peers, but he was also valued among his teachers and commanding officers.

“There was something about Matt that made him very easy to talk to,” Commander Michael Iverson said. “He was very open about himself, and it made it easy for anyone talking to him to be open in return. Not a bad kid, but boy did he love to pull pranks.”

It could be said that Matthew Holt was the culmination of his mother’s kindness and his father’s ingenuity. He had not only a passion for developing technology, but also the potential impact that technology might have on people.

*

“Takashi planted this cactus when he was five,” Masahiro Shirogane said. He pointed to a small saguaro cactus just three inches tall. We’re standing in community garden in the sleepy Southwestern town of Sedona. Succulents, mandevilla, cacti, and lavender all reached for the sky that was a shade of blue so lovely it would have made an AR renderer weep.

“He told me that it was supposed to teach him responsibility, but cactus are independent creatures. He didn’t have to do much!”

Masahiro worked from home as a freelance artist. Soft spoken and bespectacled, it was hard to imagine that this is the man that raised one of the Garrison’s most revered pilots.

“I’m surprised too!” he laughed. “Takashi was such a gentle child. He was always catching all the spiders in the house and freeing them in the yard.” Masahiro grew more somber and added thoughtfully, “Maybe that is what made him a good pilot. He had soft hands.”

Masahiro tended to the garden with care and patience. Today, he was repotting a mint plant that has outgrown its container. He gently loosened the soil from the first pot and cupped his hands under the roots while he transferred it. Gardening was inherently messy work, but Mashiro’s deft hands made the work look easy.

After patting down the the dirt in the pot one last time, Masahiro rose and led me into the cool interior of his home. One entire wall of the sitting room was decorated with an installation piece of shiny gold shapes and thin gold wire arranged like star charts.

Amanda Shirogane sat in the middle of all of it, sipping a cup of tea and scrolling on her e-reader. She had the day off from her work as an air traffic controller.

“At the time that Shiro was learning how to read, Masahiro was working on this.” Amanda said, and pointed to the wall installation. Her gaze turned wistful as she caught a glimpse over at her son’s graduation photo on a nearby shelf out of the corner of her eye.

“And he knew that my job was ‘teaching planes how to fly’. So he just,” at this Amanda paused and tossed her bleach-blonde braid over her shoulder. “You know how lots of kids have a space phase where they’re obsessed with space travel and flying? And then they get over it and move onto dinosaurs or something? Takashi never got over space,” Amanda said.

Her voice was pleasantly rough with a soothing cadence to it. It was just the kind of voice you would want in your ear while you were in a tough situation and needed someone to guide you out of it.

“I took him to work with me once. There was a daycare in the building. And he was so in awe when he watched the aircraft come on and off the runways. When we had lunch that day, he old me he was going to touch the stars. Takashi was eight! It was the funniest thing,” Amanda said.

In framed boxes hung on the walls, there were medals and certificates noting Takashi’s numerous achievements and academic honors. A talented student athlete with a passion for astrobiology, Takashi seemed destined for success long before he entered the Garrison.

“Man, no one beat his scores in the flight sims for years!” Cadet Lance Ramirez, cargo pilot track, said. His table in the Garrison canteen just so happened to be the first one I sat at to try and meet any cadet who might have known Takashi personally. “He was the greatest pilot of all time! A total GOAT! He was always giving tips and pointers and never giving up on anyone. I wanted to become a pilot because of him. I’ve never met him though. You need talk to Keith who was his, like, number one fan.”

Cadet Keith Park, fighter pilot track, was situated a few seats down from Cadet Ramirez well outside of the range of Cadet Ramirez’s long flailing arms, and was eating his meal with a singular focus.

“Shiro was— patient. He was a good pilot. It’s hard to believe he’s gone,” Cadet Park said.

“Tell ‘em about how you beat his scores!” Cadet Ramirez all but yodeled.

At this point, Cadet Park was focused on spearing a single pea at a time from his plate to bring to his mouth as to chew as slowly as possible. “I beat Shiro's’ scores.” He swallowed carefully and then added, “He gave me some pointers once.”

*

On January 14th, 2157, _Inspiration_ launched from the International Space Station at 0230 Earth time. _Inspiration_ carried with it the hope that there was life out in space. There had been promising glints of on Kerberos’ surface and scientists hypothesized it was ice. Where there was water, there might be life, and if there wasn’t life just yet, then maybe someday a Terra colony could make that possibility a reality.

Half research expedition and half scouting mission, the Kerberos mission was supposed to be a simple trip to and from a slow moving moon orbiting Pluto.

According to the ancient Greek, Kerberos was the guardian to the gates of the Underworld. Perhaps, it was not the most auspicious name to give the farther moon that would ever be explored by a manned spacecraft.

Whatever the case, and whatever the cause, the final result of an incident that happened far, far away has had a lasting impact close to home here on Earth.

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from a sub-section of the Cerberus wiki article also just because. all scientific inaccuracies are mine. cookies for the people who laugh at my bad easter eggs. sorry space fans. sorry actual journalist fans. s6 has me feeling feelings.


End file.
